“You okay now?” he said. “You can probably stand up here.”

Slipping from his back, she tore off her swim fin and found her footing in the sand, staggering a little, whimpering with exhaustion, still bent over with the cramp and that obscure pain in her gut.

Behind her, Sharkey said, “Hey, there’s blood in the water.”

By then she was kneeling on the beach, clutching her belly, howling.

12

Under the Wave at Waimea

All existence is repetition, as regular as the rise and fall of breathing, the tick-tock of waking and sleeping, enclosing the back-and-forth of daily life, the shuttling to work, to home, the rituals at weekends of shopping and cooking, each day, each week an apparent humdrum repeat of the last, especially muffled and unmemorable on this island of brilliant sunshine. Years of this. It is, this existence, a peculiar buoyancy, undisturbed, an economy of effort in a slow spin of vitality—life as rotation.

You might hope for more—for difference, for change, for harmless drama—but you learn that an unchanged life is reassuring, that sameness and placid monotony are safe.

These thoughts were Olive’s in her reliable car, going to her usual job, down the same road, on another sunny morning.

And then the interruption, the surprise, the nausea of an obscure complaint that was a sign of life; the news of her pregnancy, the shock of termination, which was worse than unfortunate, which was death.

Slashes of sunlight lit the road under the ironwoods and the palm trees, as on every other morning of her routine, yet this day was different from those days of no surprises, no magic, no windfall, no distracting event, the guarantee of the ordinary.

The miscarriage changed that. That morning, leaving for work, she’d said, “My baby is dead.”

Sharkey had stared as though she’d lapsed into another language.

She could not keep herself from sobbing, thinking of what she’d lost: her child, a future, a continuation, a new life—hope, love. Yet strangely, what her training would have a termed a spontaneous abortion was proof of life too, more dramatic than the accumulation of sensations that sometimes swelled to become significant—new experiences, new people, fresh omens, variations in the routine as subtle and welcome as an unexpected smile.

She wept for the child who was gone, she wept for herself, she wept most of all for the man who now seemed unaware of what had happened, the man who had forgotten how to weep.

He said, “Is there a problem?”

She would have said, “The problem is that you’re asking that question. Your question is proof of the problem.” But she didn’t want to risk being misunderstood. “You are the problem” was too brutal, yet it was nearer the truth.